Like thousands of residents, Tanya Valdivia was allowed back in her neighborhood after firefighters began to surround the remnants of three major wildfires that forced widespread evacuations this week in Southern California.

Powerful gusts stoked three major wildfires in Southern California early Tuesday that have charred nearly 12,000 acres, destroyed dozens of homes and forced thousands of people to evacuate neighborhoods in suburban Los Angeles and northern San Diego County.

First, they lost their land. Now the people whose families were evicted in the 1960s to create a vast nature preserve in western Kentucky and Tennessee are wrangling with the U.S. Forest Service over how to present their history to visitors.

Rain lashed water-logged California again early Tuesday, hampering efforts to find survivors buried under a mud slide in a coastal community and prompting hundreds to flee a mountain town before a rain-engorged lake spills over a dam.